Saint and Sinner

Writing history is a dicey enterprise for Chinese scholars, and never more so than when the subject is a Communist Party figure like Zhou Enlai  China's Premier from the founding of the People's Republic until his death in 1976, and still regarded by the vast majority of Chinese as a saint. "Ordinary people thought he was a good man," says Gao Wenqian, once Zhou's government-appointed biographer and more recently the author of the revisionist (and unofficial) Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary, now available in a translation by Peter Rand and Lawrence R. Sullivan. "He is...